Cloud storage has recently been receiving increasing attention and is becoming of increasing importance. The cloud offers users a cost-effective, convenient, and highly available storage service. Existing clouds rely on cost effective techniques such as data compression and data deduplication in order to save storage costs. While data deduplication is clearly beneficial as it considerably reduces the cost of storage, cloud users do not really benefit from this technique, since deduplication is typically performed by the cloud itself. In other words, the end-users are being charged the same price, irrespective whether their data has been deduplicated by the cloud. This is quite unfair, since users who are storing popular files that are deduplicated by the cloud should not be charged the same amount for storing non deduplicated content.
Existing work in the area focuses on novel techniques for performing deduplication over encrypted data, see Pasquale Puzio, Refik Molva, Melek Önen and Sergio Loureiro. ClouDedup: “Secure Deduplication with Encrypted Data for Cloud Storage,” Proceedings of IEEE CloudCom 2013 and “A Secure Data Deduplication Scheme for Cloud Storage,” Jan Stanek, Alessandro Sorniotti, Elli Androulaki, and Lukas Kenc, Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2014, or focus on the constructing of proof of ownership to attest that a user indeed possesses a file which is deduplicated, see “Boosting Efficiency and Security in Proof of Ownership for Deduplication,” Roberto Di Pietro, Alessandro Somiotti, Proceedings of ASIACCS 2012.